We appreciate the enormous support that our ABestWeb community has experienced over the many years it has served its members and sponsors. We have decided to exit this business and have placed the property up for sale and we are actively entertaining interest.

In the meantime, community members will be able to read but not post to ABestWeb beginning on Jan. 18.

We want to thank you for your numerous contributions and your ongoing support. If you have any questions, please let us know.

First, link your sites as relevant and not considering whether it is good SEO. Is it good for your visitors?

Second, if they are related, go ahead and link. If you have hundreds of irrelevant sites on the same server interlinking, the SEs will figure it out and give you less "juice". If your links are part of a linking relationship that is appropriate you can pass yourself some good link juice from your established sites to your new sites. If they are all new you aren't going to help yourself any.

It depends. If the sites have related themes, then cross-linking makes sense. If they aren't related, it makes less sense, and search engines may view "irrelevant links" with suspicion.

For example, if I had three related musical-instrument sites (e.g. WelchViolins.com, WelchCellos.com, and WelchSheetMusic.com) then it would make perfect sense to cross-link the sites.

But if I had three unrelated sites (WelchViolins.com, WelchOfficeDesks.com, and WelchToeRings.com) then the only reason to cross-link would be in hopes of transferring "link juice," and if the search-engine algorithms reach that conclusion they may penalize your sites.

Certainly, if you have an "about us" page or a general links page on your site, it might make sense to list the other properties you own.

Of course, some web publishers prefer not to publicize or promote the common ownership of multiple sites, especially if they are truly unrelated.

One obvious concern is that if you make a mistake that results in a penalty being applied, you would certainly prefer that only one or a few of your sites be penalized, not all of them.

In the past, when I operated dozens of niche-product-themed domains (2001-2005), I frequently cross-linked, and sometimes even cross-linked sites that were completely unrelated (usually via a common footer that included links to 10 or 20 sites). I certainly would NOT do that (cross-link sites that aren't related) today, and I think I would maintain more distinct separation between marginally-related sites.

Really? With Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg et al out there you don't think you can back links? What about commenting on blogs?

In my Google Webmaster Tools, I see links from most of those sources out there. While they aren't the Holy Grail links that really put a page over the top, they draw spiders, and more importantly, people.

For a long time, I've had links between my sites. But not from all of them to all of them; there are some links that go in one direction only, and some sites that don't get linked to each other. This is not for SEO purposes so much as human purposes; I want people to make connections between some sites but not others.